The mainstream American media is in trouble, big trouble. Whether in TV land or in print, the big outlets are seeing their market share dropping and dropping, to the point where it almost looks like free fall. Not only have people stopped watching and reading the news, reporters have dropped dramatically in the public’s estimation. People no longer trust reporters which, in practical terms, means that people no longer trust the news being reported. As conservatives, our first contention would be that people distrust reporters because so many have soft or hard Left-leaning political biases, but that is way too simple an analysis. Reporters have many more problems than just point of view issues.

To begin with, in today’s media world, reporters have little time to polish their stories. In a 24/7 environment, the pressure to publish and control a story is even more intense than that so wonderfully portrayed in His Girl Friday. Nowadays, hours no longer matter for story dominance; instead, minutes or even seconds may determine which outlet gets first bite at publication. This deprives reporters of the chance to look over their facts and really think about them.

It’s also no surprise, given the sorry state of American education, that many reporters are ill-equipped to deal with the information they’re required to regurgitate in their stories. In a nation with a shabby record in teaching math, I suspect that many reporters struggle to understand the numbers behind a polling organization’s far reaching conclusions. They therefore readily fall back on the one liners and conclusions contained in that same organization’s accompanying press release. Because of this easy way out, it often makes no difference to the report that the organization that sponsored or conducted the polling may have its own agenda.

The ignorance that plagues so many reporters has serious consequences when it comes to sensitive international issues. Take what goes on in Israel, for example. To the extent that Israel is every Islamist’s scapegoat, and every Leftist’s punching bag, anything that happens there is news. Every nuance matters. You’d think, therefore, that the best, brightest, and most well-informed reporters in any news agency would be sent to report on a spot where even minor events take on international significance. Sadly, that’s not the case. Last year, in Hillel Halkin’s Commentary article about “Israel’s media problem (subscription required), he opened by summarizing some of the conclusions contained in Stephanie Gutmann’s book The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for Media Supremacy:

Few foreign correspondents are particularly well-educated. Most go from one posting to another and rarely stay at any for more than a few years. They usually arrive in a country with only a cursory knowledge of its history; rent living quarters in an expensive and far from typical neighborhood in its capital; never learn to speak its language or languages with any proficiency; and socialize heavily among themselves. At the same time, they are expected to present themselves as highly knowledgeable about the place they are reporting from and to file daily stories beginning the moment they arrive. Moreover, these stories must compete for space and prominence with others filed from elsewhere and must satisfy an editorial staff in a home office that worries it is being outdone by rival media.

Everywhere, this tends to produce foreign correspondents who are heavily dependent for their information and point of view on each other and on the small number of official and unofficial native sources they manage to cultivate; who view the country they are covering as much through the prism of other countries they have been in as in terms of its own uniqueness; who have little time for research, being required to churn out copy at a steady rate; who are forced to concentrate on the dramatic and superficial at the expense of the in-depth and explanatory; and who fear nothing worse than being caught out of step with their colleagues.

And if this is true generally, it is even truer of journalists writing about Israel and the Palestinians. One reason that this is so, as Gutmann points out, is that Israel is probably the most reported-on country on earth. Dozens of major newspapers and TV networks maintain permanent staffs and offices in it, and when there are major events to cover, these are massively augmented from abroad. This greatly increases the element of competitiveness—and with it, paradoxical though it may seem, the element of conformism.

All of the above factors (rapid turnaround, low education, peer pressure) means that most reporter aren’t doing their best work on any given day. Add to this the biases that inform all human thought — and that, in the reporting world, tend to lean Left — and you’re going to get carelessly written stories that have incorrect facts, silly conclusions, and subliminal political biases. In more sophisticated publications, or with more bias driven reporters, these problems may be intentional, but I’m willing to give most reporters the benefit of the doubt and ascribe to them decent, honest intentions.

These reporter-specific problems — that is, the problems of carelessness, laziness, conformity, etc. — might be helped by genuine competition, but that’s not happening in the traditional media marketplace. While traditional media professes to be a competitive marketplace, with different outlets struggling for market share, the reality is that content comes from a few monopolistic sources. Every news outlet, major or minor, plucks many of its stories off of AP or Reuters, and the middle to minor news outlets, when not reporting on local stories, also like to pull stories off the New York Times or Washington Post. In other words, all the papers are reporting on the same thing, and often using the identical stories.

If you don’t believe me, pick an interesting topic, go to Google news, type that topic into the search box, and check out the results. At first glance, it looks as if dozens, or even hundreds, of different outlets are going after the story — something that would imply different facts, spins and viewpoints. Closer examination, though, reveals that all of these outlets are simply quoting the same AP story, New York Times, or Washington Post report. Here’s an example using McCain’s presidential announcement on the Letterman show. As you can see, despite the more than 600 different links, most (although not all) of them just rehash the AP and Reuters stories.

And this is where the blogosphere comes in. While traditional American media alternatively reviles the blogosphere or, rather ineptly, attempts to co-opt it (sometimes simultaneously), it’s the blogosphere right now that provides the competitive corrective that will force the MSM either to clean up its act or retire from the news business. To demonstrate my point, for the past few weeks I’ve been collecting evidence of inaccurate news stories that received well publicized corrections courtesy of the blogosphere. Here are just a few of the examples I’ve found:

At the end of January, the New York Times blithely published an article stating, based on a witness’ Senate testimony, that “Almost 60 percent of the scientists who responded to the survey said they had personally experienced such an incident in the last five years [when the government pressured them to remove references to climate change from their work], the report says, and those who said their work was most closely related to climate change experienced the most interference.” One day later, James Taranto, writing in the Best of the Web Today, actually examined the survey to which theSenate witness and theTimes cited to support this ugly conclusion. He discovered myriad problems with the survey’s methodology, including the response rate. His conclusion: “To put it much more simply, this was an unscientific survey. If this is how these guys do social science, how can we trust them with the hard stuff?” Without the blogosphere, the New York Times version would have stood unchallenged.

There may be some truth to this, but not very much. For USA Today and its sources have ignored the key factor behind police suicide rates: sex. The vast majority of policemen are men, and men are much more likely to commit suicide than women.

According to the most recent report by the National Center for Women in Policing (PDF, see page 2), a feminist group, as of 2001 “women represent only 11.2% of all sworn law enforcement personnel in the U.S.” That means the remaining 88.8% are male.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (PDF, see page 238), the overall age-adjusted male suicide rate in 2002 was 18.4 per 100,000, while the female rate was just 4.2 per 100,000.

If we assume that the police are a representative sample of the population as a whole (apart from the sex disparity), we would expect a suicide rate of approximately 16.8 per 100,000, not much below the 18 per 100,000 that USA Today reports.

It turns out, though, that the overall nationwide suicide rate is skewed downward because it includes children and teenagers, who have a much lower propensity for suicide than adults. This effect is so pronounced that every age group over 20 has a higher-than-average suicide rate. In particular, the overall suicide rate for 25- to 44-year-old men was 22.2 per 100,000 in 2002, and for 45- to 64-year-old men it was 23.5 per 100,000.

Sometimes blogosphere pressure is so great that the media outlets are forced to do their own debunking. In January, the New York Times proudly announced that, for the first time ever, the majority of American woman are not married (payment required). The blogosphere immedately leapt into action, pointing out that the article included in this unmarried majority (1) 15 through 19 year olds, who haven’t married in large numbers since about 1960; (2) military wives separated from their husbands by war, not divorce; and (3) elderly widows who had devoted the bulk of their adult lives to marriage and really shouldn’t be included in a list of women rejecting the institution. The truth is that 56% of American women are currently married. It’s not a large majority, but it’s a majority. The New York Times itself quickly backed away from its own conclusions (although, interestingly, the semi-retraction is careful not to mention a word about blog pressure).

The blogosphere has also proved extremely useful, just in the past weeks, as a reference tool to correct manifest media ignorance about political process. When the Senate was debating its Iraq resolution, the media kept claiming that the Republicans were cutting off debate. In fact, the opposite was true. It was the Democrats who were using the arcane procedural device of “cloture” to silence Republicans. Again, the interested public would never have learned this without the “alternative” media.

Often, the blogosphere helps to expose plain media sneakiness. The other day, the The New York Times published an article attempting to discredit Obsession, the documentary film that uses the Islamist’s own media to expose Islamist hated and calls to violence. To bolster its claim that the film is a hate-filled hit piece against Islam, the Times quoted a rabbi. After all, if a rabbi can’t stomach an attack on those anti-Semitic Islamists, who can? What the Times forgot to mention, but the blogosphere revealed within hours, is that the rabbi quoted isn’t just any rabbi. Instead, he’s a rabbi with a history:

A UCLA Hillel rabbi accused of accosting a freelance journalist in October 2003 has sent the writer a letter of apology as part of a court settlement.

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel director, was accused by Rachel Neuwirth of verbally and physically assaulting her outside Royce Hall, on the UCLA campus, during a speech by Alan Dershowitz more than four years ago.

The letter was part of a settlement reached by Seidler-Feller and Neuwirth on Jan. 19, 2007.

In the letter, Seidler-Feller wrote “I am deeply sorry that I hit, kicked, and scratched you and called you a liar. By taking these unprovoked actions, I have contradicted the pluralism, peace and tolerance about which I so often preach.”

Oh, yeah, that rabbi! That’s the one lending credibility to a Times story.

I could go on and on with examples that I’ve collected in just the last month showing the blogosphere correcting intentional mistakes, carelessness, ignorance or sneakiness in widely published or broadcast MSM stories. I think, though, that you’ve probably got the point here. I want to end this post, therefore, with a little discussion about the American judicial process. It sounds like a digression, but it isn’t, and you’ll see why if you stick with me to the end.

Lawyers often describe a courtroom as a crucible — a place in which two opposing views clash at high heat, burning away impurities, and leaving behind the truth. That’s a very high flown way to put it but, surprisingly, this view is fairly accurate. In the average civil trial, where you can reasonably assume that the parties are similarly situated economically (meaning equally skilled attorneys) each party gets to present evidence supporting his version of the “truth.” In addition, each party is allowed to challenge, quite vigorously, the other side’s presentation. Having listened to both sides of the story, the finder of fact (whether a judge or a jury) gets to decide which evidence is most reliable, and which interpretation of that evidence most compelling. This may result in a factual finding for one side over the other, or in a peculiar amalgam reached by cherry picking facts from both sides of the dispute.

This adversarial process means that, in an American courtroom, that no one can go in and simply rest on his facts without having to prove them vigorously and support them well in the face of an aggressive challenge. Lies and carelessness will swiftly be exposed, leaving the truth behind — or, at the very least, a quality simulacrum of the truth, which is sometimes the best one can hope for in the absence of perfect evidence. In this way, the courtroom is a microcosm of the marketplace of ideas. Every day, in every courtroom in America, people have to defend their ideas against attack. For this reason, while the American judicial system is undoubtedly flawed (it is, after all, a human institution), it is nevertheless one of the best things around for dispute resolution.

The blogosphere has finally created a crucible for the calcified American media. Reporters can no longer rest on their credentials and try pass off as facts unchecked stories, suspect sources, and biased reporting. They now have to go into every story prepared to do their best, because someone is finally watching — and not only watching, but able to react immediately with corrective information.

Given all this, what we in the blogosphere need to do is convince the MSM that we’re actually good for them. We’re not their enemy, we’re their bestfriend. Before the blogosphere came along, the MSM could print anything and get away with it. In the old days, journalistic ethics demanded a certain effort, but the 24 hour cycle seems to have created a type of carelessness that cleared away the past requirement that news stories actually get checked and rechecked. Even the best, most ethical journalistic working under those circumstances must begin to feel lazy and intellectually cheap. Now that we’re challenging them, though, we’re forcing them to operate with a degree of intellectual honesty and rigor that must elevate them in their own eyes and in the public’s. And that’s why, much as they dislike us, the mainstream journalists should be grateful for the fact that they “ain’t never had a friend like me” — someone who can improve their work, whether they want me to or not!

UPDATE: On the subject of media carelessness, an the rush to publish anything, so long as you’re the first to publish, Curt, at Flopping Aces, reports on a bomb that wasn’t in Iraq. By the way, this is not an example of the blogosphere helping the media correct — the military was the one that did — but it does show the problems dogging the American media, and helps demonstrate why the media should be grateful for all the help it can get to do a better job.

UPDATE II: Here’s a great example of the blogosphere publicizing something the people of California really need to know about, but that the California media has, accidentally or on purpose, overlooked.

UPDATE III: Laer takes on some really glaring errors in a BBC story about climate change. This is, again, a really superb example of the blogosphere at work, correcting bias driven carelessness in a story that a reporter, by exercising a modicum of discipline, could have written correctly in the first place (although he might have been forced to abandon his biases).

17 Responses

As conservatives, our first contention would be that people distrust reporters because so many have soft or hard Left-leaning political biases, but that is way too simple an analysis.

How about people distrust reporters because they are liars, if not dirtbags who keep reporting that the miners’ were alive and when they weren’t, just to torture the family?

Nowadays, hours no longer matter for story dominance; instead, minutes or even seconds may determine which outlet gets first bite at publication.

Doesn’t this mean, then Book, that if the Bush administration orders that all exclusives at both the White House and the Iraq Theater, be given to Fox News, that it would be better than any kind of censorship alive?

If they really care about which outlet gets first bite… well, there are ways to exploit that.

might be helped by genuine competition,

Isn’t genuine competition supposed to make people perform better, Book?

While traditional media professes to be a competitive marketplace, with different outlets struggling for market share, the reality is that content comes from a few monopolistic sources.

The AP and Reuters. Amazing how many news come from their sources…

Every news outlet, major or minor, plucks many of its stories off of AP or Reuters,

You know Book, I’m sort of shadowing you by now, because I’m relying as I read.

Lawyers often describe a courtroom as a crucible — a place in which two opposing views clash at high heat, burning away impurities, and leaving behind the truth.

Assuming both sides have the same resources and the same talent. There are limits to all things, people included.

In this way, the courtroom is a microcosm of the marketplace of ideas.

Or the logical extension of the spirt of the First Ammendment, Book. After all, why have the 1st Ammendment if nothing but lies are promulgated and believed? Perhaps Jefferson believed that the truth will out given a free and public debate. And he was a lawyer after all.

The blogosphere has finally created a crucible for the calcified American media.

I prefer a gaunthlet Book, rather than a crucible.

Given all this, what we in the blogosphere need to do is convince the MSM that we’re actually good for them.

or maybe the media needs to be convinced that they need to stop playing games.

We’re not their enemy, we’re their best friend.

They don’t want a best friend book. Competition isn’t a virtue in socialism, it is a sin and vice. It is a religious mandate… not a rational belief.

Your analogy to the courtroom, Book, is apt. The problem as I see it, however, is that, for the most part, one of the “lawyers”, the blogosphere, is only presenting to a little more than half the jury at any time, since liberals rarely visit conservative blogs and conservatives do not often visit liberal blogs.

There are exceptions, of course, but I often wish that the “jury” could be more heterogeneous and include more of the general public. Anyone have any ideas?

It’s simple: read any news story about a subject on which you have personal knowledge — your profession, your hometown, even an event you witnessed. Chances are you’ll find an error in every paragraph.

Now find a story which seems accurate to you, and get hold of someone who has specific knowledge about its subject. You’ll find that _all_ stories are riddled with errors.

Reporters don’t know about anything but journalism (and often don’t seem to know much about that). For everything else they rely on hastily-skimmed Wikipedia articles or press releases handed out by factions with an agenda. So far I haven’t seen any news stories which cut-and-paste from Wikipedia, but I have seen several which were press releases with a reporter’s byline added.

I blame two things: the rise of journalism schools, so that it’s possible to become a “professional journalist” without doing anything but attending classes, and the shrinking budgets at newspapers. Reporters don’t have the chance to develop expertise on a subject, and they don’t develop their craft through experience and apprenticeship.

Solutions: I think reporters should play to their strengths. A local paper doesn’t need to print _any_ national or international news. Nobody relies on them for that. But they’re often the _sole_ source for local news, and reporters could devote the time and energy to really learning about the community.

Smaller and mid-size papers should also try to build more cooperative alliances with non-competing publications, so that they can specialize. The Amarillo paper, say, could focus on agriculture issues while the Beaumont news could cover the oil patch, then trade stories. That’s what wire services should be, but aren’t.

It takes about 10 years to get really good at something, at anything really. From chess to sports to whatever.

So…

How many years have these people spent studying war, diplomacy, and what not? If they are going to report on crime, don’t you think a career as a criminal prosecutor would be really useful? Or if not that, then 10 years working with prosecutors as sources? But they don’t seem to have this system.

You touch on a large part of the problem in passing, but it is such a large part it deserves a bit of emphasis.

My own experience is with NBC, which was, once upon a time, a fairly good news organization.

A little history. When the networks owned themselves, and the FCC actually did some part of its job, things that were presented as “facts” were checked. All three networks accepted that the news operations were going to be expensive to run and would lose money, but be good for prestige and license preservation so they accepted the losses.

The networks maintained news bureaus all over the world, staffed at all times, and stringers everywhere. The payroll was huge, but you had feet on the ground just about everywhere. This was a total loss, financially, of course, but it was great for coverage.

Then Ronald Reagan came along, and deregulated everything in sight, and that was fine, but perhaps he was a bit too zealous in that endeavor. He should have exempted the networks. Because of course what happened was that now anyone could own one, they could be bought up, so they all got sold.

The FCC stopped regarding them as being businesses run primnarily in the public interest. You only got a license to broadcast over the public airwaves in the first place by accepting the requirement to provide accurate news and information, and with the license-grantors looking all the time, you worked at it. When people complained, it damn well meant something, and networks occasionally had their licenses threatened, and some individual stations around the country in fact had their licenses pulled over the years. (That was serious: no license means you can’t broadcast, which means you’re out of business.)

But that all stopped when they were sold, the FCC stopped taking its job seriously, and they became businesses no longer primarily interested in a solid product. Instead they became (forcibly) interested in being money-making divisions of GE, or Cap Cities/Disney, or Viacom.

Jack Welch shows up at NBC, of which he is now the boss, and goes through the place like a tornado. The first thing to get smacked was the news department. Why the hell do we have a bureau in Perth, Australia? Athens, Madrid, Opporto, Wellington, New Delhi – and on and on. We don’t need to be paying people to be there in case something happens, close them. Save that money! If we have to, we can fly people in.

So the world-wide network of bureaus – gone. Taking with them the people who lived there, DID speak the language, DID know the history, and had local contacts, and some involvement. All gone. An expense we can do without.

And then the axe fell at 30 Rock – why do you have ten people in your department? Get rid of two of them. Those two, all they do is sit on the phone all day, fire ’em. (They were, uh, the fact-checkers, Jack…) And then of course, as a good corporate boss, he’d come back the next year and say, “see? Eight people were able to do what you used to think you needed ten to do. Eliminate two more this year. You can do it.” (There goes the warfare specialist, and the diplomacy specialist.) A year later, same thing: “See? You only needed six. Now, tighten the operation, get rid of two more.”

And Jack Welch gets a reputation as the greatest genius who ever lived!

Same thing happened with all three networks. So here you are: you now have no bureaus anymore, so you have no experienced people in far-flung places; and you’ve eliminated all the researchers and fact-checkers back home as dross, so nothing gets checked or verified.

And so, because you no longer have the ability to find and develop anything yourself, you become increasingly reliant on, for example, the AP. No network people are there – wherever – on the ground any more, when needed they fly in and out. They all stay in the same hotels and eat at the same places – just like the “green zone” in Baghdad. (That’s there because it’s a war zone, but London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, You-name-it, all have their green zones as well.) Who do you socialize with in the bar at the end of the day? Why – each other. Because no one on your payroll LIVES there, or knows any locals to talk to, or knows the languiage to talk to ’em, or has any sources: hell, you closed your bureau twenty years ago! So they hang around the bar and talk to each other, and check the wire in the morning.

Thus, everybody does a rehash of the AP feed.

The network news organizations have a tenth the payroll they did twenty years ago, in the interests of costs being cut so the bottom line is black, the shareholders get a dividend – and thus the CEO gets a bonus.

The product of course goes in the toilet, but, you know: we’re profitable! Can’t have an omelet without busting a few eggs!

Same thing happened with the big newspapers. They were never regulated, but they’ve had to be cost-cutting too. They can’t afford the people they used to be able to afford, and they never had the luxury of taking losses. They didn’t have the entertainment division to rescue them. So they all rehash the AP feed too.

I looked at the Seattle Times last Sunday, the entire first two sections were produced by AP, and the Times Bureau – not one locally-written story. And Seattle, much as it strikes everyone as a joke, is the twelfth largest market in the country. The twelfth largest market in the country did not have ONE story in the first two sections of the Sunday paper written by a reporter who lived within a thousand miles of it.

You ain’t never had a friend like me Bookworm The mainstream American media is in trouble, big trouble. Whether in TV land or in print, the big outlets are seeing their market share dropping and dropping, to the point where

Some Bill’s Bites posts, some things I excerpted and linked but I’m sending you to the original post. I may rearrange the order of the items within this post as I add new things that I think belong above the

While the reduction of news divisions’ budgets certainly contributes to the uniformity of the information broadcast my the MSM, I don’t think the perspective of that information is greatly affected by said cuts. The media were anti-conservative long before Reagan was elected. Many of the commentators seemed to be hitting the sides of their heads when Reagan too the oath of office.
The perspective of the MSM will only change when that of the journalism schools change. Or if the media is held liable financially for their lack of professionalism.
Al

That’s perfectly true, Al – what I said doesn’t go to point of view. But, when people such as Rush Limbaugh say that all the news organizations get a daily fax of talking points from the democrat party, that’s just not true. They all get the same information, but they’re getting it from the AP, and the reason is because they don’t have the people on the ground anywhere to get it for themselves.

There are some funny examples, such as the idea expressed by a wire writer in advance of the 2000 election that Cheney was chosen to provide “gravitas” to George W Bush. Remember that? It was, truly, hilarious: every talking head in North America spewed out the word “gravitas” the next day on the newscasts, and, given that it’s a word you don’t hear every day, it stuck out like a sore thumb. It made the universal reliance on a single source GLARINGLY apparent. (And, of course, should have been embarrassing as hell for the news biz – but wasn’t.) People like, again, Limbaugh; put together whole montages of every talking head in the country’s use of the word, and it was funny as hell!

But the word was not a democrat talking point: it was an AP writer being imaginative. And every network, and station and anchor in the country being solidly, spectacularly UN-imaginative.

They’ve always been unashamedly liberal, yes. But they used to have to be honest. When Walter Cronkite went on the air during the Tet offensive in 1968 and blew his own already-tattered reputation to shreds, it was a hell of a lot closer run than most people know as to whether he was going to get back in the building next day for any purpose other than to clean out his desk. There were several folks – serious folks, whose opinion counted – in Black Rock who wanted the sainted “most trusted man in America’s” ass fired through the nearest window right then, at that moment; and if it happened to be a 53rd floor window, well, fine.

Cronkite got away with it, he took a calculated risk and he survived. But he very nearly didn’t, a lot more nearly than you know. And notice, a few years later, nobody made the least effort to stretch the mandatory retirement age for him, either, like they did for Brinkley at ABC, or even the ass Rather a few years later at CBS. He went from “most trusted man in America” to “here’s a cupcake with a candle in it, happy retirement – get out” in about eight seconds.

So yes, they’ve always been liberal, that’s just the way they are – and the “why” is a good question. I don’t have a good answer. Went to J-school myself a while back, don’t recall that I found it overwhelmingly liberal. In those days they were still training us as journalists, and you had to have proof – solid sources – for everything, so I guess it was, at the time, a much more technical deal than it has become. (“I don’t care what you say, but you’ll say it in literate English, and you’ll have a source with a fact behind every sentence – and you’ll keep in mind that no one outside your immediate family gives a good goddam what YOU think.” – Prof Tim Cohane, circa 1968)

Interesting points, JJ. It just does not seem that the MSM really cares if they look like they’re the same chaise with different logos or not, whatever Limbaugh says about them.
We have a similar situation in microcosm here. The local rag, The Press of Atlantic City,NJ, has an interesting history. It has a decided antipathy to some city administrations, and an absolute, “love is blind” behavior toward others. We are currently an era characterized by the latter behavior. The smart money explaining the behavior is that the local state senator, with multiple connections with contractors, likes a city administration that plays ball with his friends. Said local senator has the complete support of the Press.
Now, could it simply be that what explains the MSM behavior is the old phrase, “Follow the money.”?
Incidentally, if you know of an aspiring young journalist looking for his first Pulitzer, tell him to spend some time in Atlantic County, NJ.
Al

But as one with some insider knowledge, I just think some attention needs to be paid to what was really the seismic shift that happened with, particularly, the networks, within the last 25 years. They stopped being independent, and in existence to serve a mandated purpose at least as much as they were in existence to make money – and became pure profit-making enterprises. (In the sense that they became divisons of corporations determined to make profits. Which meant that they needed to become cost-cutting, profit-making divisions of said enterprises.)

You might – some people might – recall that there was a time there when the Tisch organization owned CBS, before Viacom bought it. For about twenty minutes. Larry Tisch’s idea was to do away with the news division altogether – the hell with news, it costs money. When he found out that the terms of the license that permits them to use the airwaves wouldn’t allow that, he was happy to sell it.

It’s all about money, and the orientation of Disney, GE, and Viacom is to make it, while spending as little as possible doing so.